All is Well

Thursday night, I got a call from my sister saying that our father had gone into the hospital with chest pains. He was scheduled for a heart catherization on Friday morning, with a possibility of open heart surgery after that.

I got over to Kalamazoo around 2:30 yesterday afternoon to find him still waiting for his catheterization. He seemed to be doing fine, aside from a ferocious case of hives in reaction to the hospital bedsheets. They took him into the OR around 6PM and said we would have some word about him in an hour. About 40 minutes later, the surgeon came out and told us everything was fine--they didn't find a single thing wrong with his heart, and that he was in better condition than many people 20 years younger. Apparently, the stress test he received when he checked in to the hospital gave a false indication of problems. What caused the chest pain is uncertain, but it's unrelated to his heart or any other major system. He got to go home around midnight, and I made it home before the rain turned to snow.

When we spoke to him in the recovery room, my dad remarked that this was an awfully expensive way to find out nothing was wrong. My stepmother replied that many people in the hospital would gladly pay for such results. True enough.